(ONE of the reasons) Why I love Vermont...

I live in a pretty rural town, by most people's standards.  The grocery store here flooded one too many times, and finally closed a couple years ago.  So I drive a few towns over to do my grocery getting.  It's only slightly larger than the town I live in (meaning they actually have a stop light), but still have more stores that supply food for livestock that for people.  Anyway, this is the place where most of the county does their food buying, so you're pretty much guaranteed to run into someone you know, whether you want to or not.  As I learned today, you're also guaranteed that, even if you've never met them before, they're going to treat you like they've known you their whole life.

I get stopped a lot in the grocery store.  Like a weirdly high percentage of the times I set foot in the place, I can bank on at least an extra 10-20 minutes of chatting to take place.  My husband told me today that I need to grow way bigger muscles, a huge beard, and shave my head.  He says it works for him.  No one talks to him when he's shopping.  I told him that sounds interesting, but I don't think he'd talk to me anymore either if I did that.   Basically, I live in a predominantly "white" community, and I stroll through the grocery store with one of the cutest babies on the face of the planet, who just so happens to not be white.  People in Vermont are not shy.  Almost every time, someone looks at him, then looks at me, we end up having a conversation about adoption.  I'm actually really impressed by this most of the time.  One time while we were still waiting to adopt, my husband and I were out to lunch and there was a family seated next to us.  A Mom and Dad, and 2 little boys who were quite obviously not from the same gene pool as their parents, but happily referred to them as "Mommy" and "Daddy."  We left there that day kicking ourselves for not having said anything to them, because we had a million questions about our own adoption process we were going through, and wanted desperately to talk to someone who had the been-there-done-that t-shirt.  So I'm always impressed when someone has the guts to just come out and ask a total stranger about one of the biggest events in their lives.

Today was no exception.  I was approached by a woman in the soap aisle who had a thousand questions about adoption.  The first question is always "Is he adopted, or is he yours?"  Well, the answer to both of those questions is, "YES."  But this woman was so amazingly sweet, and I quickly remembered back to a time when I was asking people questions like that, and instantly forgave her for the oversight.  By the time we were done chatting, I knew her home address, in case I was interested in coming to look at the house she's pondering selling soon, and she had my phone number in case she had more questions about adoption.  THAT is  (one of the reasons) why I love Vermont.  I would never in a million years go to any other corner of the world an exchange personal info about my home address, where my kids go to school, and where I grew up with ANYONE.  But here, we take leaps of faith that the people who seem sincere, and kind, actually are.  And I love that about where I live.


Thanks for stopping by,
-Lindsey